New Scientist SPACE - Breaking News - Plasma bubble could protect astronauts on Mars trip: "A bubble of plasma could shield astronauts from radiation during long journeys through space, researchers are suggesting. If the idea proves viable, it means heavy metal protective panels could be replaced by a plasma shield of just a few grams."
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Plasma shields up! Ok, maybe it isn't Star Trek...yet. The plasma would have to be contained inside a superconducting wire mesh that would surround the whole ship, but hey, you have to admit that plasma shields are cool. Come on now. Admit it. There you go.
The idea is that in space, you have all sorts of cosmic radiation that would bombard the ship and go right through the hull. Unless you make the hull really thick, e.g. several inches of aluminum. But aluminum (a.k.a. aluminium to the Brits) isn't very heavy, you say. Well, a few inches thick sheets are really heavy. I've used big chunks of aluminum for building microscopes and we aren't even in the same city as the ballpark of the stuff you put over your potato salad (assuming you don't use Saran Wrap).
If you make a ship with a hull that is thick enough to block the cosmic radiation, it will be too massive to effectively work. The more mass, the more fuel you need to burn to get it up to speed (or else you have to go really slow and the trip takes years). So a plasma shield would mean that we could make an interplanetary space ship that is a practical mass.
Accounting for the balance of mass/fuel/radiation shielding is one of those things that many SF writers conveniently ignore.
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